I need to tell you about the absolute brutal shit I went to get through to get this picture.

Four exposures, stacked and bracketed at -2, -1, 0, and +1. Doing an exposure at 2 would have made me bring out the bulb and since I don't have a remote shutter, I gotta do it with my phone, and I wouldn't wish CanonConnect on Stephen Miller. So that said, I stood there at Kerry Park in Seattle, amongst seventy or a hundred other people, and they were all trying to capture this with their terrible little phone sensors, and I had my actual real shit, I was the only one with an actual camera.

So I took my exposures and some extra ones on the side, came back home to Portland, and set to work. My +1 was slightly off, just a little windblown. Darktable doesn't give a shit, it's not aligning nothing. I had Hugin stack up my control points and try to align it, told me it was a success, but every last point of light looked like AI circa '22, so that was a no-go.

In the end, I just edited the 0 exposure and just went with that. Dammit.

Thanks for seeing my frustrating work.

Oh also @nothingcorporate@lemmy.today, eat your heart out, here's a space needle.

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[–] 5 points 3 hours ago* (1 child)

The whole notion of merging bracketed exposures without using a tripod is newfangled witchcraft.

My very limited experience with merging photos (panoramas, in my case, mainly) has been that my available commercial option (Affinity 2) works a lot better than the free ones (I must have used Hugin years ago) I've tried.

I think your photo came out well!

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 3 hours ago (1 child)

    Ah, but that’s the thing: I was using a tripod! I was just bad at it, I guess.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 hours ago (1 child)
  • [–] [S] 2 points 3 hours ago (1 child)

    It also didn’t help that the interior of the space needle was slowly rotating.

    I think my problem was that I pushed the shutter button and that nudged the whole camera each time.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 hours ago (1 child)

    Many cameras have a two-second self-timer mode to help out in this situation. Which doesn't stop the Space Needle from rotating, of course.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

    Yeah, but then I'm stilll applying force to the camera body by virtue of pressing the shutter button.

    I think I need to endure CanonConnect or get a remote timer.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 hours ago

    I have a camera that supports Canon Connect, but after reading about it on the web a little bit, I decided I'd try it out ... some other day. That day hasn't come yet.

    I also have a cheap ($10 or less) simple wired remote shutter release. That always works. Worth the $10.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 hours ago

    My Canon has an option for using the touch screen as a shutter, while using live view mode.

    That works better than the 2s timer IMO.

    And canon connect does suck ass... I remember some third party apps, but those also didn't work super well.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 hours ago (1 child)

    Thanks for the reminder to buy a cable release. I want to try nightime pictures like this.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 3 hours ago (1 child)

    My sister joked, on the trip home yesterday, that the purpose of my life was to serve as a warning to others. :D

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  • [–] 3 points 14 hours ago (1 child)

    Did you try - 2, - 1 and 0?

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 14 hours ago (1 child)

    Yeah, I tried 'em in every permutation, shit's just fucked. Happens that way with most of my brackets. :(

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